Louis de Pointe du Lac! Wanted to draw something similar in feel to the Armand picture I did recently. The two are vaguely in line with the Seven Deadly Sins with Louis representing Sloth (which is where ‘sadness’ also falls).
I don’t see Louis as a sad-sack, I think he represents being stagnant either because of grief, powerlessness, whatever the case.
Haha, so hard for me to do it! It’s too voluminous😂
But yes, I sometimes enjoy translating VC books into a shōjo manga style in my head while reading them, and there are some scenes I want to draw. I’ll try to do those scenes…someday! lol
And also! I have some silly short-fancomic ideas in my head. I’m going to draw at least one of them during this summer. If you would like to, please take a look when It’s posted here~ (*^_^*)
listen i might be drunk but im right. art & literature & nature & music make life worth living. people who look like they were ripped out of a caravaggio painting make life worth living. go organize a bacchanal in the woods. take pics of your lover in your hotel room in venice. who cares if there’s a void in your soul. who cares if you can’t get attached to anyone. neither can michelangelo’s david.
//Hey thanks so much for the birthday wishes and such a great question!
GOD I love Louis for so many different reasons and could really go on for days lmao but I think the main reason I love Louis so much is that he reminds me why humanity and life is so precious. I’ve always found his character interesting because as one of the first “reluctant vampire” tropes, he was vampire I was introduced to who had a moral compass.
This is going to sound a little weird and maybe a bit narcissistic, but for my job training, I had to take this personality test called the Clifton Strengths Analysis test, which will tell you what your strongest personal and leaderships skills are. My number one “strength” was empathy. And while I wasn’t thrilled to have empathy as my strongest quality, I’ve actually learned to love it, through learning how Louis utilizes this quality throughout the series.
When we first meet Louis, he is the personification of guilt because of what happened with his brother, but that guilt sticks with him throughout his transformation, and it becomes incredibly important as he attempts to navigate the new world as a transcended being. He is conflicted as hell, and insists on punishing himself via starvation because he is so heartsick and guilty and full of grief both for his brother, and for his humanity. When he is first turned, the empathy that he possesses doesn’t exactly work in his favor. He is overly empathetic, and refuses to take life because he empathizes too much with everyone (this is doubly hard considering that he does not have the mind gift, so he cannot weed out the bad seeds from the good ones; he tends to assume most people are innocent, or at least undeserving of death). But as he grows older and begins to figure stuff out, I think he is finally able to sympathize and empathize with humans in a gentler way, and I really admire that. He eventually learns to exist in the world and admire the human beings that he walks amongst, and I love that about him. In fact, one of my favorite moments in the series is when he stands up to Akasha and says:
“Then kill me! I wish that you would. But don’t kill human beings! Don’t interfere with them. Even if they kill each other! Give them time to see this new vision realized; give the cities of the West, corrupt as they may be, time to take their ideals to a suffering and blighted world.”
He is fiercely attached to the human race, even though he is no longer a part of it, and he’s even willing to risk his life for them.
Another of my favorite things about Louis is that he’s ridiculously complex and dichotomous as a character, which makes him super interesting in my eyes. You know that phrase: “I’m lover, not a fighter, but I’ll still kick your ass”? Yeah, that’s Louis. Like I said earlier, he’s very empathetic and intuitive and emotional, and he purposefully remains the weakest vampire and rejects the vampiric gifts because he wants to remain as close to being human as possible. Yet his determination in fighting the vampiric gifts makes him incredibly strong in a different way, and I really admire that. Louis, unlike Lestat, Armand, Marius, and most of the main characters of the series, has never went under ground. He has stayed alive and sentient for two and a half centuries without needing a break. His stamina and stubbornness are incredible, and yet when people think of Louis, these usually aren’t the first qualities that come to mind. Louis is a Romantic, melancholic beauty, sure, but he’s also like a great oak tree: strong and solid and unyielding.
And at the end of the day, he’s a straight up ruthless killer. We see this in his treatment of not only Lestat, but Armand’s entire coven. And while these were killings of passion, it is also evident that he is a meticulous and heartless killer when it comes to his hunting methods. In fact, one of my favorite moments in the series is when the Queen of the Damned herself calls him out and says: “Yet you yourself are the most predatory of all the immortals here. You kill without regard for age or sex or will to live.” So how can someone so full of emotion and empathy kill so carelessly? I think the answer lies in the fact that he does not have the mind gift, and has never willingly accepted or used it, so he cannot pick out the “evildoers” like the others, and therefore must kill indiscriminately. But one thing that I also headcanon is that because Louis is so constantly tormented by guilt and overwhelmed by emotions, he could never sustain himself if he didn’t have some way to switch the emotions off; he’d be too drained to do anything (in fact, we even see this scenario play out in his first few years when he’s feeding on chickens and rats). So he eventually learns how to switch those emotions off when he hunts. It’s a defense mechanism. And while it ensures his survival, it also makes him dangerous as fuck, because that means he can switch of his empathy and love for mankind like a fucking light switch.
ANYWAY, I think my main love for Louis can be summed up in this description of him by Lestat:
“Just a little blood, and Louis might be stronger, true, but then he might lose the human tenderness, the human wisdom … the gift of knowing others’ suffering with which Louis had probably been born”
TL;DR: I love Louis because he is so complex and though he is the most human-like vampire who possesses an aching tenderness and erudite nature that speaks to my very soul, he is also a dangerous badass whose moral stance is highly debatable. I love all sides of him!!
I think
it’s my favorite scene in the movie, because it’s the one where – when you are
blank of later stories portrayal – you realize that Lestat is not this
one-dimensional villain. This scene is so symptomatic of his attitude:
first he’s all flame and rage, then he casts a bard, and
while fiercely smiling over his “victory”, he already regrets what he just said.
He does have a conscience, whatever kind of nasty or stupid things he can come up with, and he’s genuinely affected and
struggled by what he’s inflicting on his loved ones. He’s without any shadow of a doubt an unbearable brat, but also so much more than that. It’s not that this
dork has no affection for Louis and Claudia – he indubitably does – it’s just
than he doesn’t know how to hold a close/family relationship without being sometimes unfair and/or cruel.
Big shout
out for Kristen Dunst and Tom Cruise here, by the way. They are both amazing.
I always think the look on Lestat’s face here is him realizing is that he genuinely doesn’t have an answer for Claudia’s question. Even he doesn’t know why he acts the way he does. I think he sincerely does want them to be a happy family, and yet he’s continually the one getting in the way of that by treating Louis and Claudia does. Even here, he’s obviously touched and happy at the idea of making peace with Claudia – “We forgive each other, then?” – and yet he instinctively still twists the knife in with what he says to her. He’s making himself miserable almost as much as Louis and Claudia, but he can’t seem to just snap out of it and be a genuinely good father or partner. And deep down, I don’t think he even really understands why he’s doing it.
It’s a question for the audience to think about too, I think – why does he do it? I think when you know his backstory, you have to wonder if on some level he associates love with being hurt, and he’d rather be the one hurting others than getting hurt again. Or maybe he just literally has no idea how to have a healthy relationship or a healthy family, since the family he grew up with was horribly abusive and he hasn’t really had any positive relationships since then. (His mother and Nicki are the two possible exceptions to that, but they both came with some serious complications and ultimately dysfunction.) None of this excuses the way he acts in any way, of course – it just is interesting to think about how he became the way he is.
I-want-my-IWTV 